Comeback Story
by whipplefilter
Summary: An accident at the track leaves Cruz with amnesia. As she and Lightning struggle to come to terms with her diagnosis - changes in taste and temperament, memories no longer shared, and bonds no longer present - they also confront the possibility that those memories might be gone forever. And even if they do come back, there's no turning back the clock. There never is.


The headlines have a field day with this–Lightning McQueen's protege getting electrocuted. (And because Guido and Luigi put the hospital on lockdown, after that first shock the press has nothing to occupy themselves with but an overabundance of their own puns.)

At first, it doesn't seem like there's anything wrong. The nurses jump her battery and everything comes back online. When her eyes flutter open she sees Lightning and she smiles. She recognizes him. Hamilton needs to be re-installed and–Cruz notes with dismay–her radio pre-sets are scrambled, but that's not really a problem Lightning can empathize with. She can drive without assistance and and her brakes and transmission all check out. No computer issues. Everything checks out.

"I can't believe you're spending so much time with me," Cruz tells him after the first few days. She bites her lip, looks a little starstruck.

"I mean… Of course," says Lightning, a little self-conscious. He's never sure if he's yet outrun the shadow of who he was his rookie year. Like maybe people still see him as that guy, or maybe when he lets his guard down he _is_ still that guy. "I'm not gonna let you sit in here alone, Cruz."

"But shouldn't you be doing your own PT?" she asks.

Lightning cocks a brow.

"That's why you're here, isn't it? At the hospital, I mean. Because of your big crash last week."

"Cruz, what–" Lightning breaks off. "Cruz, I–"

He stares her down, every bright expectant inch of her. Dread clenches in his heart so hard that it feels like hitting that wall again. "Cruz, it's–"

His gaze flicks to the doorway, where Luigi and Guido are peering in. "Never mind," he says tightly. Then he asks Luigi to please go get Cruz's doctor.

 _Now._

–

She doesn't remember anything. The last eight months are just gone.

It's lucky, says the doctor. Electrocution can be wild like that–if it doesn't burn your circuits irreparably to begin with, and kill you outright. In the scheme of things, eight months is very lucky.

The last patient she had in a similar situation? He lost three years. Had an accident working in his garage and woke up to a Lexus he didn't recognize, thinking it was 2004. Except it wasn't 2004. It was 2007, and he was in the middle of a divorce and the Lexus–apparently she's his girlfriend. The girl who broke his marriage and whom he now cannot remember.

"Yeah, but–" Lightning shrugs.

Yeah, but he doesn't care about that guy. Yeah, but these eight months weren't like everyone else's eight were special, they–

"You're right." The doctor sighs. "You're not like everyone else. Because like I said, Ms. Ramirez is _lucky_."

She writes Cruz a reference for a number of follow-up appointments with this or that specialist and sends them on their way.

–

"Well, obviously," says Sally, as she maneuvers a push broom around Wheel Well's trickier sconces. Lightning is supposed to be washing windows, but he's even worse at it than usual. He keeps getting lost midway, his thoughts falling back to Cruz and forgetting about the soap suds, which leave aggressive streaks on all the windows.

"Things aren't the same, so of course acting like they are isn't going to get you anywhere."

"I don't know how else to act!" Lightning exclaims. "I thought maybe if I just acted normal, it'd help her–remember, maybe, or something–I don't know. Am I just supposed to pretend those eight months never happened? She's not an idiot. She knows that they happened. Or I mean, she knows I know."

They can't just start blank slate. Time, memory, whatever you want to call it–it happened, and none of it can be undone. Even if apparently, it can be forgotten. If Lightning could just meet Cruz all over again and start at square one, he'd do it. In a heartbeat. That's what it had taken after his crash–long months of learning his body again, learning how to make it move. Really move.

That, Lighting can do.

But memory? He and Cruz, it's like they had their first shot at getting to know each other. There aren't do-overs. There's no room for that.

It's not really memory _loss_ , Lightning figures. Loss implies emptiness which implies a void that can be filled again.

Forgetting takes up too much space.

"Nice job with the windows," says Sally.

When Lightning snaps to, he's parked next to an empty bucket and Sally's the one with the squeegee. He doesn't remember her taking it.

–

Cruz makes better friends with the town than she ever was before the accident. Part of it's they've spent so much time here. Tex pulled them from the rest of the Cup season, so they haven't had anywhere to be. It was the right thing to do–a no-brainer, frankly–but part of Lightning still wanted to shout, No!

No, because if everything is different, then she'll never remember what it was. Nothing will ever go back to normal.

It's Mater who reminds him that nothing _is_ ever going to be the same. That's how time works. Living in a junkyard, he gets real contemplative about stuff like that sometimes, he says. He says it comtem-PLATE-ive.

Cruz is laughing with Flo and Ramone. She's been interested in painting lately, and Ramone is only too happy to send her out to the junkyard with some of his old paints. She misses her old job at the Center; hasn't said much at all about racing.

She knows, by know, what those eight months had entailed. Or at least, the public beats of it. Being employed to train Lighting, being in the Florida 500. Racing in the Piston Cup. Lightning hasn't had the willpower to tell her about the beach, or the school bus of death, or rushing through the Carolina forests, all moon dark.

Cruz is already working on trying not to feel guilty about forgetting. About not caring about that stuff–she can't; she wasn't there; her brain now wasn't there, anyway. The last thing she needs is more guilt.

Maybe it's better this way, Lightning tells himself. Cruz and Sally are becoming fast friends. It's not that they hadn't been pleasant to each other before. But Sally'd always been Lightning's lawyer, Lightning's girlfriend. Old Cruz had known Radiator Springs through Lightning, and perhaps by virtue of that had always regarded them at a polite remove. Like he'd been in the way, somehow.

Maybe those memories were roadblocks. Maybe he is a roadblock.

Maybe it's better this way.

–

Tastes, temperament. The doctor nods, tapping her front tire on the ground as she lists things off.

Yes, all of those things can change after an electrocution. Electrocution is–

"Wild. Yes, you said that," says Lightning, impatient.

Electrocution is wild, and the mind is wilder. Sometimes it changes in utterly random, unpredictable ways. Silly ways. Cruz likes Pearl Jam now. She's thinking of painting herself green, because she doesn't know if yellow really feels "like her."

Not that it's any of Lightning's business what color Cruz is, but it's this kind of stupid stuff that makes him want to drive off a cliff. In lieu of a cliff, he resolves to go red again. He doesn't think he can handle this otherwise.

–

Lightning feels himself unspooling. Which is unforgivably selfish, because this is Cruz's issue, this is Cruz's journey, and this is not about him. But it's like even his version of those memories begins to fray and tangle. Like maybe now they were only half as real. Like maybe they belonged to some other universe, and their power dwindled as their home planet receded to its outer orbit. (This is a Mater analogy. Something about UFOs. Lightning's not really sure, but at the time, and in Mater's words, it had felt like a lot of sense.)

He can feel himself drawing back. Back through the dread, the threat of failure, the frustration. Back to the four months he'd spent sitting in Doc's garage–Doc's garage that was still a garage because Lightning hadn't let them expand the museum, because Lightning is hopelessly slow to let go of things like that.

As the weeks pass and Cruz's new memories paper ever-thicker over the old ones, Lightning ties his best to keep to that pace.

But he'd needed her. That Cruz. Old Cruz. He'd needed those moments.

He still has them, he reminds himself.

He's not the one with freaking amnesia.

Sally tells him it's okay to feel the way he does. "If you really care about someone, and they go through something terrible, it's natural to feel wrecked, too. Believe me."

Lightning looks at her, wants to kiss her. Wishes he'd never met her. Wishes he'd never wished about never meeting her, because he knows he cannot live without her. And he knows exactly why Sally might know how he feels. "Sal, I'm so sorry."

Sally shakes her head. "Stop. I can _see_ you missing the point," she says. "Lightning, you have to be kind to yourself."

–

Cruz may never recover those memories, says the doctor. If she can build a life without them, then maybe that's for the best.

"She can," says Lighting, because he believes that Cruz can do anything. Except, maybe, remember. "She is."

"So, your doctor is nice," says Lighting, on the drive home.

"Sure," says Cruz.

"Nice weather."

"Lightning, come on."

Lightning, not Mr. McQueen. Because everyone back home calls him Lightning, so now Cruz does, too. He never imagined his own name could sound so awkward, magically less familiar. He hadn't even liked being called Mr. McQueen. But he'd liked what they'd had. He can't help that.

He doesn't know if he can get over that.

"I'm sorry I don't talk to you so much," says Cruz, turning him back to the present. "I guess I just– It feels hard, you know? 'Cause I know that you and I, we– And I just–"

"I know," says Lightning.

Maybe if he were older, this wouldn't be so hard. Eight months weighed against a couple decades–that's nothing. And they have so much more time to make more memories together. And that's a positive, right? That's a bright patch, a silver lining.

It doesn't make Lightning feel bright, though. It makes him feel old. Now he feels too tired to make friends with Cruz all over again.

He wants what they had.

–

One night, Cruz wakes up screaming. She doesn't remember her nightmare.

What she cries about afterwards is this: What if she does remember? One day, after all the work she's done to be okay with forgetting. To make some new life. What if she does remember and her whole life turns into a giant fork in the road?

"I'd explode," she sniffs. "But like, you're supposed to want your memories back. In the movies, that's what makes everyone happy."

In Lightning's mind that's what makes everyone happy.

"But I can't just sit around, hoping that maybe that happens. I'm here, and I gotta just–be me, and not keep trying to hold on to the past. Like, I don't even have it–I can't hold onto it. But every memory I make, at the back of my mind I keep wondering, what if I do? What it it happens? And every day, every memory, I know I'm just going to make it worse if it ever does happen. And I just–"

"Shhh," Lightning murmurs. He nudges her side gently and taps a pleasant vibration against her front tire with his own.

There's not really anything he can say to her, and it seems foolish to try. He's her crew chief, not like, her fairy godmother. Or a psychic. Or a time traveler. Or God.

But he stays with her. They sit in the dark together and it doesn't feel like old times but it doesn't feel like less.

"I think you'll be okay," he says eventually. "And you're definitely not going to explode. So, uh, there's that."

Cruz does not believe him. At all. "What if I remember, and I regret leaving all those memories behind? What if I'm just like, shoot, I should have just waited for them to catch up? What if those memories just turn into one big fiery ball of regrets? And then I explode? I mean, you can't scientifically prove that won't happen."

"Oh, never wait for anything to catch up," Lightning says immediately. "You start doing that, and life's just gonna lap you."

"That's very sage, Mr. McQueen," says Cruz.

"I think I meant that really, really literally," Lightning admits. "Wait, what did you just call me?"

"I called you Mr. McQueen," Cruz repeats sleepily. "I dunno. It just felt right."

–

It's been eight months and thirteen days since Cruz's accident. The doctor reminds them, once more, that her memories may never return.

But even if they do, there's no turning back the clock. There's no "back to normal." Normal is already here. It's Cruz's paintings hanging in Mater's yard. It's her late-night jam sessions with Fillmore. It's being Sally's best friend. It's nightmares, all the time, about nothing. It's that pang of loneliness Lightning feels sometimes, even when Cruz is bouncing right in front of him, even when he's surrounded by family and friends. It's that strangeness that never quite leaves.

Because memory is "–wild, I know, you say that every time we come here," say Lightning and Cruz in unison. The doctor blushes.

There is no going back to the way things were. But, Lightning figures, that's not what "comeback story" means.

Never has.


End file.
